There must be more than me in the world who can repair and upgrade machines ?

Machines are arriving twice as fast as I have time to repair them. I get stuff sent to me from all corners of the world. Its one thing to help people out, though I've done around 20 RTC updates and repairs in the past couple of years alone, its turning into a full time job in its own right As people know my fingers are hurting a lot these days, and doing lots of fiddly stuff all the time isn't helping Soldering is pretty much agony for me these days and I get stuff shipped elsewhere to do the work for me now.

I want to spend time on developing new hardware and its just getting impossible to keep up with anything anymore. I've got enough machines to fix to keep me going until likely xmas time, so could really do with finding people who are reliable and who can do good work for people...

It's a similar situation for myself with work I'm 48 and the average age of engineers in the steam industry now is about 60, so we are struggling to get new blood into the industry.

I guess you are a victim of your own success. The trouble is that anyone can fix a modern pc by changing a graphics card or the Ram but not many repair shops will do component level repairs at all. I can't remember the last time I saw a scope in a computer shop, probably be back in the 80s.

Anyway, as much as I would like to help, my pile of hobby repairs is getting larger and the time to do it is getting shorter.

If I wasn't in full time work, I would offer, as I feel like my skills have come along sufficiently to be able to make many ST repairs and upgrades with no problems. Being based in the UK would make it easy too.

But right now, I'm working 09:00 to 17:30 weekdays, and spend most Saturdays and Sundays catching up on maintanance about the house, and only when that is done can I look at my other stuff of a weekend, and as a result my own rather small pool of projects (Well compared to yours Chris!) is going way slower than I'd like them to.

Add in the fact that I have Karate training twice a week after work, and I just don't have the time for more

The term "electronics engineer" these last years seems to be "board swappers" . Some people think they are electronics engineers just swapping PCI cards about in PCs

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind doing such things, but I can't do repairs and work on upgrades at the same time.. I mean look at the progress on the STFM 50MHz booster.. no work for ages because I am always distracted with peoples machines.. mix in 100's of emails each day and my whole days is gone.

The term "electronics engineer" these last years seems to be "board swappers" . Some people think they are electronics engineers just swapping PCI cards about in PCs

I noticed that, I think because its cheaper to just swap bits and hope they work together or at all. I used to do all that board level stuff checking caps, voltages, PSUs, temperatures, bad solder joints etc. no one was willing to pay for that with a PC, when a new motherboard was £30... now a ST/Amiga/Sega/SNES/CPC whatever you just cant get so you stuck. So now we have a generation of parts swappers on the lose.

Same with cars just swap what the computer says, no one takes the computer as a guide its normally wrong anyhow or they don't realise its something else that caused the fault like a broke bit of pipe.

There must be more than me in the world who can repair and upgrade machines ?

Machines are arriving twice as fast as I have time to repair them. I get stuff sent to me from all corners of the world.

It's more amazing people are actually bothered and there's that many actual users/machines left and people willing to spend on them, maybe the people spending on them are all the people who had these things as kids but now they have money and can go wild, nostalgia is a powerful thing

I have to actually scale down. After 13 years of trying, my wife and I are finally having a baby girl. IVF was what it took. 1.1.2019 should be the day. So full time IT work at a huge insurance company doesn't leave much free time for anything else so something has to give, at least in the beginning.

No room for kids in my life, Our cat is enough for me, still half wanna kick it out of the door at times!

Will probably just have to start saying "no" to more people, probably keep it to one repair every 6 months or something. Soldering is hard going for me these days (fingers again), been doing it for like 30 years and really just rather avoid soldering as much as possible as really don't enjoy it anymore,

It's more amazing people are actually bothered and there's that many actual users/machines left and people willing to spend on them, maybe the people spending on them are all the people who had these things as kids but now they have money and can go wild, nostalgia is a powerful thing

Most if it is Falcon stuff, not exactly cheap , so worth spending time fixing.. Everyone's changing the RTC for example.. half send machine to me to do all the work, others try themselves and break loads of crap, then send it to me to repair it which takes twices as long

No room for kids in my life, Our cat is enough for me, still half wanna kick it out of the door at times!

Will probably just have to start saying "no" to more people, probably keep it to one repair every 6 months or something. Soldering is hard going for me these days (fingers again), been doing it for like 30 years and really just rather avoid soldering as much as possible as really don't enjoy it anymore,

Thank you very much! Don't worry, I'll teach the little one to solder so we'll be back in business in no time

No room for kids in my life, Our cat is enough for me, still half wanna kick it out of the door at times!

Will probably just have to start saying "no" to more people, probably keep it to one repair every 6 months or something. Soldering is hard going for me these days (fingers again), been doing it for like 30 years and really just rather avoid soldering as much as possible as really don't enjoy it anymore,

Thank you very much! Don't worry, I'll teach the little one to solder so we'll be back in business in no time